Atheism or Christianity?

Make a Defense

“Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”

1 Peter 3:15

Beneath the question of which church is true lies a deeper one, and it is the subject of this section: which worldview better accounts for the world we actually live in — the Christian one, or the materialist one that says matter and energy are all there is?

The pages here argue that Christian belief is reasonable. Not that it can be demonstrated the way a theorem can, and not that an unbeliever must be either stupid or wicked — a claim this section rejects explicitly and more than once. The argument is that the evidence, taken together, is better explained by a God who is there than by a universe that simply happens to look this way.

Each page follows the same shape as the rest of the site, with one difference in name. The Skeptic View or Atheist View panel states the unbelieving case at its strongest, from its own best writers — Hume on miracles, Mackie on moral values, Ehrman on the manuscripts, Coyne on science and faith — and with no reply mixed into it. The Christian View panel answers. The Summary puts the case in brief.

Some of the best arguments in this section come from unbelievers, and they are quoted because they are true rather than in spite of it. A philosopher of science who thinks Hume’s case against miracles fails; a New Testament scholar who grants that no Christian doctrine depends on a disputed reading; an atheist who agrees that objective moral values would be very strange things indeed. Where the other side concedes a point, that concession is worth more than anything a believer could say for himself.

About This Section

Belief in God is often dismissed as a leap in the dark, held against the evidence or in the absence of any. That is a claim about what faith is, and it can be examined like any other. These pages examine it, and then take up the questions that decide the matter — beginning, as they must, with what the word “God” is even supposed to mean.

First, What Is Being Claimed

Two pages clear the ground. What do we mean by “God”? answers the sky-daddy caricature by setting out what the classical tradition has actually meant — not a very large and powerful being inside the universe, but the source of being itself. And what do we mean by “faith”? distinguishes the thing Christians profess from the credulity the word is often taken to name. Most arguments about God founder before they start, because the two sides are discussing different things.

The Arguments From the World

Why is there something rather than nothing — and does a universe that need not have existed explain its own being? Why is it so finely balanced for life, and why is it intelligible to minds that evolved for finding food, written in a mathematics we invented on paper? That last page also takes up the supposed war between science and religion, which turns out to be a specific piece of nineteenth-century polemic with two authors and a date.

The Argument From Obligation

Are right and wrong objectively real? Nearly everyone lives as though cruelty were genuinely wrong rather than merely unfashionable. The page makes a narrow claim and concedes a great deal: unbelievers know the moral law and often keep it better than believers do. What is hard to account for on materialism is not moral knowledge but moral obligation — the fact that we are bound and not merely inclined.

Whether God Has Acted

If God exists, has He done anything? That is a historical question rather than a philosophical one. Can we rationally believe in miracles? examines the rule that disposes of every such report in advance, and asks whether it would also have kept us wrong about meteorites. What is the Bible? takes up the manuscripts, the canon, and what inspiration does and does not claim. Did Jesus rise from the dead? weighs the one miracle on which everything is staked, from the creed older than the gospels to Hume’s rule against believing any of it. And why Christianity? asks why this religion rather than another — the answer being that it stakes itself on something that either happened or did not, in a known city under a named Roman governor.

And the Objections That Deserve Better

The hardest argument against God is not philosophical but personal, and no honest section can hurry past it. Why would a good God allow evil? asks about the suffering that is not the tidy textbook kind, but children with cancer and the whole long record of human cruelty. That page does not claim to dissolve the difficulty. Anyone who tells you the problem of evil has a neat solution is selling something.

The other objection that deserves better is the historical one. Does history condemn the Church? takes the indictment — Crusades, Inquisition, Galileo, slavery, the abuse scandals — and begins with concessions a pope made in public liturgy rather than with excuses. The cases are then examined against the modern scholarship, and the question pressed is the one that decides the argument: whether the faith taught the crimes or condemned them.

How These Pages Argue

The other side is quoted at its best. Not the loudest unbeliever available, but the ablest: Hume, Mackie, Ehrman, Coyne, Wielenberg, Lüdemann. Where two unbelieving positions contradict each other — as error theory and robust moral realism do — both are given, because pretending the other side is unified would be a straw man.

Nothing here is offered as proof. These are arguments about which account better explains the evidence, and a reasonable person can weigh them and remain unconvinced. Anyone promising a knock-down demonstration of God’s existence in five paragraphs is not being serious.

And no one is called a fool for doubting. The doubts treated here are treated as worth having. A faith that can only be held by refusing to look at the strongest case against it is not worth holding.

Summary

This section asks which account of the world holds up better: that it is the work of a Mind, or that matter and energy are all there is. The claim is not that unbelief is stupid. It is that the evidence, taken together, fits one account better than the other.

Settle the terms first. Most arguments about God collapse because the parties mean different things by the word. The pages on what we mean by “God” and what we mean by “faith” are the place to start, and a good deal of the usual dispute does not survive them.

Then the world itself. Its existence, its fine balance, its strange intelligibility to minds that evolved for other purposes — and the fact that obligation binds us rather than merely inclining us. None of these is a proof. Together they are a pattern that materialism has to explain away rather than explain.

Then whether God has acted. Miracles and the Bible lead to the one claim that can actually be checked: the resurrection, announced within a few years in the city where it was said to have happened, to people in a position to contradict it.

And the objection that does not go away. The page on why God would allow evil makes no claim to dissolve it. It is the strongest thing said against belief in God, it is felt more than it is argued, and any treatment that leaves the reader comfortable has not understood it. Its historical twin — the record of the Church herself — is faced the same way: concessions first, then the scholarship, then the question of whether the faith taught the crimes or condemned them.

In short: what is offered here is a case, not a proof. Weigh it and you may still disagree — but the questions are worth asking honestly, and the world we actually meet is harder to account for without God than the confident version of unbelief allows.

A special word to readers who came to this section from the Watchtower pages: if an organization failed you, that is a fact about the organization, not about God. The case made here stands on its own evidence, and if it holds, the question of where Christ’s church is to be found comes next — taken up under Others vs the Catholic Church and, practically, in Your First Mass.